Wednesday November 27, 2024, I’m getting set up to write. I have a fresh coffee, my laptop and a comfortable chair. I start by scrolling through yesterday’s work, familiarising myself with the scene I’d left off the day before. Just like any other day. I start to write.
Then I look up.
In front of me is a huge glass window, twenty people are gathered outside it watching me. To my left, a gigantic television displays, in real-time, my work-in-progress manuscript. The cursor blinks. The people on the sidewalk lean in. I start typing. They read every word.
This sounds like every writer’s nightmare—the author equivalent of that dream of public speaking with no pants on—but there was no waking up from this: it was real. I’m in the front window display of Dymocks flagship Sydney store, on the bustling George Street, live-streaming my writing process of my next novel to thousands of people walking past, every day for a week.
That’s how my new book, Everyone In This Bank Is A Thief, was born.
The idea behind it was simple: let people see, for real, what goes into writing a novel. When you pick up a book off the shelf, it’s been edited and read by dozens of eyes, every sentence teased and massaged as close to perfect as one can hope. I wanted to show how it’s done, all the hard stuff on display, at the coal face. I wanted it to be hard. I hoped maybe an aspiring writer might see me toughing it out in a first draft and think: that’s not so different from how I feel.
In the end, I ended up learning more about myself and my own processes than I thought possible. Here are 7 things I’ve learned from writing in the Dymocks window.
- I am a worse speller than I think I am. There is nothing more humiliating than the eyes of a dozen curious passers-by watching me fumble the number of ‘f’s and ‘l’s in fulfillment.
- Fear boosts my creativity. It was terrifying, and creatively freeing, to have all of my processes and decisions on display. But, somehow, it helped. I’m a notoriously slow writer. On a good day, I write about 500 words a day. In the window, I didn’t have that luxury, I had to write at least three times that much consistently to have words flowing. If I wasn’t putting something on the screen, the whole stunt wouldn’t have been entertaining. I was afraid to be boring. As such, I had no time to dawdle on creative decisions, I had to pick the most entertaining one and run with it. It was a breathless, exciting way to write a novel that I couldn’t have found at my desk alone.
- Every word counts. Writing in public taught me the value of every word in a sentence. I could see people’s faces and reactions directly and learn if I was hitting the right notes. There’s a sentence in Chapter 5 that is in the final copy as: “Why would someone who’d never met me want me dead?”. This sentence started out as: “…want to murder me?”. This did not impress the crowd. Too clunky. Then: “…want to kill me?”. Still a stoic audience. New edit: “…want me dead?”. Nods of approval. And in the book it goes. It was like doing stand-up comedy, reading the room and following the energy. It was a live editing experience.
- I played fair. It was the real book in the window, authentically whatever I came up with on the day went into the story. And because I write murder mysteries, yes, all the clues and spoilers were there! People asked if I cheated or planned it before, but I didn’t want anything to get in the way of that true fear that might generate something creative. Characteristics of people walking by found their way into the book: the colour of a coat, a hair style. The only way to write that way was to do it authentically.
- Bookshops are magical places. I’ve written in bookshop cafes before. But never have I felt so in the blood of a place than being in such an iconic storefront. There is just nothing like the invigoration of being a tiny piece in that historic space that has housed so many stories. Add in the vibrancy of seeing the shopfloor staff every day, the enthusiasm of bookselling and story-telling first-hand, and it was a tonic to creativity that, if you could bottle it, you’d make a gajillion bucks.
- All comers. I loved the variety of interactions I had during this time. I received dozens of messages, visits, and well-wishes. I also consistently got asked: are you completely insane? A man stopped and sketched a picture of me. Another couple stayed for over an hour to read the end of a chapter I was working on. I also discovered that it doesn’t matter if you are an author or a zoo animal, teenage boys will tap on the glass and make funny faces at you.
- No matter how many times, in how many places, in however big size font your name is plastered, no matter how many covers of how many books you have stacked around you, someone will always, always, ask you where the fantasy section is.
So, here we are, now the book is finished. Much of what I wrote in that time is still in the book with only minor edits. I wrote in public for four hours for 7 straight days, resulting in around 11,000 words: approximately Chapters 3 – 7 of the final version. If you walked past me on one of those days in November, pick up the book and play spot-the-bit-you’ve-already-read.
You can be the judge, but I think it really paid off. There’s an energy and zap to this book that I love, baked into its DNA from its (admittedly traumatic) beginning. There might just be something to this whole ‘writer zoo’ thing…
Next stop: the zoo. You’ll find me past the snakes and the lizards, tapping on my laptop from behind the glass.
